


Mutie Lord

by laleia



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Bujold
Genre: Bujoldfest 2008, Gen, POV Minor Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-28
Updated: 2010-03-28
Packaged: 2017-10-08 09:44:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laleia/pseuds/laleia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When word trickled down to Silvy Vale about the mutie lord, well, we didn't believe it at first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mutie Lord

When word trickled down to Silvy Vale about the mutie lord, well, we didn’t believe it at first. A mutie? For a lord? Surely it wouldn’t be allowed. We didn’t know what to think, but that the off-worlder Lady must have had her hand in it. We didn’t know what to believe, but that the Vor were growing lax.

Y’see, it wasn’t so long ago that the purity of the genome meant something on Barrayar, and mutie babies were _dealt_ with.  Now, they say it only happens in the backwoods villages – but backwoods is what we _are_.  We don’t have access to the things they do in the cities, we don’t have the nice houses and the fancy educations.  We do what we have to get by in Silvy Vale, and for a long time, that meant mothers _dealing_ with their babies.

They say now that only the ignorant do it, but it wasn’t so long ago that muties were hated and feared by all. And even _when_ you dealt with your mutie problem, people might look at your family askance – nobody knew _which_ one of you passed on the mutie gene, after all.

And you expect us to believe that a right proper Vor lord of _our_ generation and surely our beliefs, Count Piotr who fought so hard with and for us during the Cetagandan War, that he accepted a _mutie_ as heir?

We learned, eventually, that the Count had not and would not accept a spineless, bodiless, brainless, legless mutie (what he lacked exactly changed from story to story) in the Vorkosigan line. So even though we were proud of Lord Vorkosigan, who was Regent to the Emperor and all that, we, especially the older ones, spat every time the mutie lord came up.

But then it came about that Count Piotr had accepted the mutie after all, and none of us knew what to think. It was around this time that muties were no longer … well, everyone still hated them, and was still verbal about despising them, but it was no longer _exactly_ acceptable to act on that hate.

I saw the mutie lord, once, the only one from Silvy Vale to at the time. He wasn’t lord then, just a mutie boy who might one day be lord, and he wasn’t yet ten, and I only saw him from a distance, chattering away at the Count. He didn’t seem like some mutie, just small and undersized, and though I knew he was ten, he didn’t look much older than six. Or at least, not much taller than six.

He was a mutie, maybe, but he was a child first, and even from far away I could see the genuine joy on his face when the Count patted him on the head, no doubt with some word of approval.

I went back to Silvy Vale and told them all, because I felt a little sorry for the boy, and told them the truth, that he was just a boy who was small for his age. But most preferred the stories with jars and tubes and perverted off-world things. No wonder, if we had such in Silvy Vale like Mara or her Ma, who I was grateful had passed before she could personally march up to Vorkosigan Surleau herself and “deal” with the mutie problem.

Either way, I thought it all was behind us, because when it comes down to the bones of the thing, what does it matter to some poor backwater hillfolk if some mutie becomes lord or not. It wouldn’t affect us in any form more than rumors and gossip.

But then Harra’s babe died. 

We older ones who had lived with Mara’s Ma for so many years, we had our guesses about what kind of thing was afoot.  I’m sure Lem had a seed of an idea too, and that only Harra was in the dark.  Harra, who came to me demanding I arrest Lem when she must surely know deep down it wasn’t him.

Harra had been a sweet child, everyone said so, and not just because they were glad Mara had finally … had finally come up with a clean one. And maybe everyone spoiled Harra a little bit for it, out of gladness and relief and so on. So Harra had never had to face certain … _realities_ that her Ma had, and so when she came to me with her dead babe, I believed in my heart that the best thing to do was to lie to her. Because innocence like Harra’s is rare, and I didn’t want to see it spoiled.

When she disappeared, we searched for days because we were afraid she might have gone crazy with grief and done something to herself. Lem was so distraught, and Mara I carefully watched, and everyone worried.

And then Harra came back, her eyes hard and her lips tight, and she seemed older and more pained, and she brought at her back none other than the mutie lord. The mutie lord who seemed blazing with desire for vengeance, to catch a murderer, like it was personal.  Maybe for him, it was.

But what would a Vor lordling like him know about the day-to-day lives of hillfolk like us, who scrape out our living from the land and live in almost squalor compared to what _he_ gets? Even if he was a mutie, he’d probably never starved a day in his life, never watched someone die of an illness whose cure was too far away. He’d never lived our life, and yet he came to judge, to _accuse_ us of underestimating poor Harra as if _he_ knew anything about her and her life.

He came with his fancy horses and his fancy clothes, his hunched back and sickly size. He came as the Count’s Voice, with all that weight behind him. And on him too, I’m sure.

He came and he expected us to change, and he expected us to obey, and he expected things to be easy, because all he’d need was to find his murderer and order an execution, and it wasn’t like _he’d_ ever have to come back again and live with the consequences of what he’d done.

This mutie lord came and we rearranged our lives for him. Or rather, he came and turned our lives upside down. He issued his orders, and watched with his glittering eyes, and dug up the poor babe’s corpse, and accused me of neglecting my duties.

He was right.

I could not hate him, though, nor fear him. He may have been a mutie, but so far it seemed to me that just meant he was shorter and odder-looking, but no more odd-looking then a man shrunken with age. It was as I had seen before, but he was older now, and firmer, and seemed to bear tides and tidings of change with him.

Because I could see him trying to change us, trying to change our nature. He tried to explain, so many times, to people who would not understand this chemical interrogation stuff, how fast-penta meant he would only catch the person who had actually done it. He tried to convince Zed, who doesn’t think at _all_ if he can help it, or at least he didn’t at age 12, to think about implications and consequences and effects, something boys rarely do until they’re men. (And sometimes not even then.)

I watched him as he reacted to everything Silvy Vale had to throw at him, from Ma Mattulich, to burning tents, to injured horses, to innocent suspects. He was Vor, through and through, concerned for the safety of my sons with one breath and using expensive, life-saving technology all for the sake of a _horse_ with another.

But he did something I had not never thought possible, especially not of a not-so-mutie lord. He caught Lem Csurik, and then let him go, and then caught Ma Mattulich, and bore it all.

He kept his word when asked, and showed mercy when important. He fished out of Mara the truth the village had been keeping secret for her, and managed to coax from her a little of the younger, sweeter Mara I knew before she had been forced to kill her own children by a cruel, hard woman of a mother.

Because say what you will about fast-penta, what I saw during that interrogation was the force of the young lord’s personality at work. I watched as he pried out of Mara her confession of past crimes, past murders, past babies; watched as he tore from her what she truly thought and felt and not just what was instilled in her; watched as he made it all work through sheer force of will.

And then, in the end, when he could have had Mara killed and been well within his rights to do so, he chose such a more elegant way.

Our new lord, he may not be as tall as some folk, or as strong as others, but he seems to do all right. Others may whisper about his mutie background, but we in Silvy Vale, we have a powersat and we have a school, and we have a daily reminder of what the new lord has done for us, has taught us.

He may be a mutie lord, I guess, but he’s _our_ mutie lord.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Bujoldfest 2008 prompt: Someone's point of view on Miles during the 'Mountains of Mourning.'


End file.
